I know it doesn't matter why the NYT are so fucked up about covering the election, but I can't stop thinking about it anyway. Then, Greg Sargent's podcast gave me an idea. The oppressor in a fascist state doesn't need you to love them, so long as you don't love anyone else. The NYT isn't trying to make us love Trump, that's impossible. But they are trying to make us not fall in love with Harris. I doubt they foresaw that possibility. But our feelings about Harris are very much love. The NYT is our only master, they must think. There's no room for us to love someone else, because we might listen to them. In a sense they respond like a first born child on the arrival of their little sister or brother. I don't know. As I said it doesn't matter why. That's their problem. Our problem is to get them out of the way.#I don't want to give Trump any ideas, but he's complaining that Harris is forcing him to run as an incumbent, so he might as well take credit for all the things Biden did. #
The NYT et al aren't even doing a fair job of covering the election as a horserace, because they're making sure it's a virtual tie, so even if our team has overwhelming power, speed and depth, and gets on base in every at bat and plays by the rules, our odds are no better than the other team. #
- The Twitter API still works, with some serious limits. Not easily incorporated into products, but useful for individuals with developer accounts. Not an insurmountable hurdle, it seems, though I was a developer from before. A few bullet points.#
- My linkblog now reliably works on Twitter and Threads, in addition to Mastodon, Bluesky, RSS and WordPress. #
- I was confused about the status of the Twitter API, but it turns out it's still there, and there is a package that connects to it for Node apps. #
- It took me a few hours to add support for Twitter in my textcasting server app which is how my software connects to all the various services. #
- I should probably add a plugin abilitiy for textcasting so that other services could easily be added, without modifying the core app. Totally doable. It's already factored that way internally.#
- I should probably write some docs for it too. 😄#
- Anyway, the deal with Twitter is that it's free for up to 1500 posts per month, as I read it, which seems manageable for one person (me), but no way is it enough for a community of users. #
- Why connect to Twitter? People are there. Until they aren't we're going to need a way to push stuff to Twitter.#
Doing the investigation into getting UserTalk running in 2024 has been a trip. The last time I did any work on this code, or even in this area of computer science, was approx 1990. It comes right back, like riding a bike. I saw a tremendous amount of potential fun here, but I had to move on to runtime, object database, verbs, user interface -- for Frontier. In the 34 years between then and now -- a lot of software has been written, and I'm only looking at a fraction of it, limited to stuff that runs in Node, the browser and Electron. And I have to say I'm totally enjoying reading about what they've done. I'm learning about evolution of technology, a facet of development I am extremely drawn to, in a whole new way, as if viewed through a tunnel in time. #